After Washington, D.C.–based forensic psychologist and author Dr. Alex Cross loses control of a sting operation resulting in his partner Tracie Fisher's death, he retires from the police force.

His departure is short-lived when Megan Rose, the daughter of a prominent US senator, is kidnapped from her private school by a man named Gary Soneji, who is disguised as her new computer science teacher.

US Secret Service Special Agent Jezzie Flannigan is held responsible for the breach in security that allowed Soneji to take the girl.

Knowing there is no other recourse, Cross complies and follows a set of directions to a number of public phone-booths spread out throughout the city where he will make deliveries and collect further instructions.

One of the primary elements of the book screenwriter Marc Moss eliminated from his script was that Soneji is actually a mild-mannered suburban husband and father suffering from dissociative identity disorder resulting from having been abused as a child.

Also missing from the film is a romantic relationship shared by Cross and Jezzie, her trial and eventual execution by lethal injection, and the discovery of Megan (Maggie as she is known in the book), hidden away with a native Bolivian family near the Andes Mountains, two years after her kidnapping.

But Spider couldn't be better served than it is by Mr. Freeman, whose prickly smarts and silken impatience bring believability to a classless, underdeveloped thriller ...

[5] Robert Koehler of Variety felt "the very characteristics that have made Cross so appealing, particularly his mind-tickling abilities to assess and outmaneuver his criminal opponents, are reduced here to the most fundamental and predictable level ... As reliable as any actor in Hollywood, Freeman delivers the requisite gravitas, but the bland script curtails any personal touches he might have inserted were his sleuth character unraveling a truly vexing mystery".

[6] However, critic Harvey O'Brien weighed in with the sentiment that "unlike, for example, the overblown kidnap movie Ransom, Along Came a Spider plays down its sensational elements.

It favours the procedural aspects of Cross' investigation which, though infected with the usual 'Eureka' factor of brilliant discoveries by the leading man at regular intervals just when it looked like he was stumped, are largely delivered with sincerity.